Usually when you create a new Xcode Project you can choose to setup a new Git repository. This is the best and easiest way to track your changes. However if you have a project that is not under version control you can create a Git repository retrospectively.
This is fairly straightforward using the Terminal app on your Mac (under Applications / Utilities):
- cd into the directory where your project resides
- then initialize an empty repository (git init)
- and add the entire directory to it (git add .)
- commit your changes (git commit -m “initial commit)
So far so good. However Mac has a hidden directory called .DS_Store in every directory – we may not want to track that. Plus, every time you make a minor UI change in Xcode (such as open a group in the file explorer or something that is not relevant to your actual code) Xcode tracks this change in a file called UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate, and we definitely do NOT want to track that.
To tell Git that we don’t want those two things, we’ll amend our previous instructions a bit:
- cd into the directory where you project resides
- create a file called .gitignore
- add each file or directory on a new line
- then create, add and commit your files to Git
Let’s assume my project is called MyProject, then the steps are as follows:
cd MyProject vi .gitignore (add the following lines to that file) # ignore these files .DS_Store MyProject.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcuserdata/myusername.xcuserdatad/UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate (save and exit vi by pressing SHIFT-Z-Z) git init git add . git commit -m "initial commit, omitting several files"
If you have already committed all your files and forgot to setup the .gitignore file you must manually remove the files/directories you don’t want from being tracked. This is how you’d do that:
git rm --cached .DS_Store git rm --cached # ignore these files .DS_Store MyProject.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcuserdata/myusername.xcuserdatad/UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate git commit -m "removing files I no longer want"
Replace myusername with your own system user name obviously, and MyProject with the actual folder in which your project resides.